Snowflake Challenge #7

[pronker]

Good morning to all. I'd wish for: 1. any reminiscences for the first fan site you've visited, such as Fanpop, 2. any opinions on the Gothic TV show, Dark Shadows (1966-71) and 3. an icon for Dreamwidth from that program, subject being Willie Loomis, acted by the stellar John Karlen. He's excellent.

Comments

[venusinthenight]

The first fan site I visited was one where the owner would post a different Friends quote a day or week. I was in high school when I found it, and the show was very much in first-run.

[pronker]

That sounds fun and surely simple for the host to do. Was there anything like a forum or mailing list, too?

[venusinthenight]

IIRC, no.

Wish Granted!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 1. any reminiscences for the first fan site you've visited, such as Fanpop, <<

Oh gosh, I kinda predate the website thing. My first fannish home online was alt.callahans on Usenet.

Not long after that, individual fansites began to appear and were linked through webrings. I loved webrings. I would get on one and just surf for hours, like sightseeing out the window on a long drive, one scenic view after another. :D


>> 2. any opinions on the Gothic TV show, Dark Shadows (1966-71) <<

That was one of my mother's favorite shows. She also liked The Addams Family, The Munsters, Star Trek, and Lash LaRue. It's funny how mentioning one brings up all the others. Mom was a big Barnabus Collins fan and told me about him.

Eventually someone released the BC episodes as a collection of their own, and we got the first volume. So I've seen his introduction and ... maybe one or two others? It was cool to see a bit of history, and Barnabus made a very spooky presence, though I'm not enough of a soap opera fan to stick with it. I was always more into the Addams Family and adore the recent Wednesday.

Re: Wish Granted!

[pronker]

It was pretty farfetched and we'd run home to catch it after school. Often, we'd miss chunks so dedicated fans would tell us the following day what happened "when Maggie tried to stab Barnabas!!" or "who forgot their lines and so stared at the teleprompter the most gigglesnort" because we were brats.

It's interesting to read about Usenet because I'd not ever been on it, though webrings proved delightful when first internetting in '05. Some folks' sites used strobes or mint green writing on sage green background, ha.

We watched all your Mom's faves, though my fave western star was first Roy and then Gene. Never cared too much about Hoppy. Lash resembled Humphrey Bogart, I thought.

Re: Wish Granted!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>It was pretty farfetched and we'd run home to catch it after school. Often, we'd miss chunks so dedicated fans would tell us the following day what happened "when Maggie tried to stab Barnabas!!" or "who forgot their lines and so stared at the teleprompter the most gigglesnort" because we were brats.<<

Mom said that all the neighborhood kids would rush home to watch it at her place.

>>Some folks' sites used strobes or mint green writing on sage green background, ha.<<

I still see ones with fire-engine red backgrounds. >_< And remember how for several years everyone put autoplay music on theirs?

>>We watched all your Mom's faves, though my fave western star was first Roy and then Gene. Never cared too much about Hoppy. Lash resembled Humphrey Bogart, I thought.<<

I like The Lone Ranger myself. I found it amusing how often Tonto had to rescue him. Especially hilarious is that "Tonto" means "fool" in Spanish, but in Native American tribes, the Fool or Trickster is an incredibly powerful role.

[sarajayechan]

My first fannish haunts were a variety of classic gaming sites, mostly NES. NES World where I learned about the concept of pirated games and romhacks, Seanbaby's website, Geosponge's page full of made-up Game Genie codes, tsr's NES Archive.

[pronker]

Thanks for replying, these sound fun.

[barbaratp]

Estava mais para um blog, chamada Forks Mania, e eu não só visitei como com o passar do tempo passei a redatar algumas matérias sobre Crepúsculo para o site/blog (daí o título do seu nome). Era muito bom e foi uma época da minha vida extremamente grandiosa.

From Google translate:

[pronker]

Que maneira de mostrar amor pelo seu fandom, escrevendo e visitando o site. Isso é ótimo.

Re: From Google translate:

[barbaratp]

Na época eu comecei somente como leitora assídua até que minha participação constante me levou a ser uma editora convidada do site. Não durou muito pois o hype de crepúsculo declinou rapidamente nós anos seguintes além de que as responsáveis pelo site foram cada uma cuidando das suas vidas (se tornaram mães, escritoras, empresárias e etc) o que levou a uma queda de participação e por fim seu encerramento.

[luvbarryfefe]

I think I can grant 2 of your wishes :) As a serial fan at heart and a lover of supernatural themes, Dark Shadows is a natural fit for me. I started watching it early last year with my mom (I have the whole coffin set and everything) from the very beginning starting with "My name is Victoria Winters" on the train. I love the show, its atmosphere, its characters are like nothing I've ever seen before or since.

I haven't gotten quite as far into the show as I would like but I am enjoying it. I have recently "met" Willie Loomis, as played by John Karlen, and I *vastly* prefer him to the original Willie. The first actor (can I be honest here?) gave me a bit of the creeps. He had a very um, predatory vibe. John imbues Willie with a lot of character and vulnerability. He makes him very interesting person with lots of layers. Anyway, I made a few icons of John as Willie. I really hope they're okay:

Thanks for reading!

[pronker]

Thanks so very much!! They're splendid. The show grabbed me recently as it did at first airing - that's wonderful you caught the very beginning, which I did not, coming in about the time it switched to color. The work John did, wow, the performing nuances and physical aspects ...

Ahhhhh, the final icon, with the seminal moment of ~First Contact *fallzoverdedofthesqueebutnotliterally*

Best wishes and happy viewing to you and your mom. :)

[linky]

The first fansite I visited was a Sailor Moon one! Sadly I cannot remember which one exactly, because there was a ton way back and I perused so many of them. But I know it was definitely on Geocities. (Though I remember encountering ones on Angelfire and other places too!)

Thanks for reading!

[pronker]

Geocities remains a favorite place to reminisce and I believe there's a Geocities Recovery movement somewhere? Sailor Moon has some of the cutest character design and costumes ever.

Re: Thanks for reading!

[mekare]

Yes! It‘s called Neocities! Also, yes to Sailor Moon. <3

Re: Thanks for reading!

[linky]

There is! Though I can't remember the exact link off the top of my head. And Sailor Moon really does have great designs and costumes!

[greetingsfrommaars]

not familiar with the show, but the first fan site I visited was almost certainly fanfiction.net! but before that I encountered things like fanart and comics on DeviantArt and YouTube.

Thanks for reading!

[pronker]

deviantArt and YouTube practically immerse one in fandom's visual aspects - I bow and curtsey to those creators who add song, clips, and sometimes animation to my favorite fandoms. The Dark Shadows show was a soap opera spiced liberally with Gothic themes, and yes, the plotlines could drag on. fanfiction.net remains a fun place to visit, IMHO, because of the simplicity of the layout and *ahem* no confusing tags such as AO3 spouts.

[jenab]

The first fan site I visited was The Book of Gates for Stargate Sg-1. It was full of gen stories and primarily a text site with very little graphics that I remember. Which was good because I was on a dial up connection back in the 1990s.

It was my first introduction to fan fic and led me to further poke around until I found mailing lists.

Thanks for reading!

[pronker]

I'm glad you shared this - the dialup connection plus the fanfic sort of equaled out, maybe, one delightful and one tedious?

[majoukoufu]

I can't remember the specific first fan site I visited because I was so young, but I spent a lot of time on Geocities and Angelfire sites as a kid! Simple starry-sky backgrounds, animated pixel icons indicating different characters speaking to introduce the different site sections, background MIDIs or 30-second MP3 clips of the chorus of a song, etc.

Thanks for reading!

[pronker]

Yep, some sites were superlively.

[bedes]

The first fansite I ever visited was undoubtedly Bulbapedia! I first ran upon it as a child, and I didn't really get that entries were supposed to be a semi-serious articles, so I edited in some emotion-driven information about my favorite Pokemon at the time only being available via event, haha. Nowadays, I frequent the Bulbagarden forums and still visit Bulbapedia all the time! Every single day of my life, I am actively grateful that Pokemon has this site, instead of some ad-riddled, basically-unreadable-on-mobile fandom.com page.

Also, if you'll forgive a quick attempt to indoctrinate people to the indie web scene -- if you miss seeing / making fansites, check out Neocities and Nekoweb. Lots of cool, active, modern-day fansites there. I specifically recommend this Invader Zim fansite, this Splatoon fansite and this Hatoful Boyfriend fansite.

Thanks for reading!

[pronker]

It's grand to hear your experiences. I'm all in favor of Pokemon! Neocities sounds like fun. I recall different regions on Geocities called Soho and so on, little subgroups. I'll check it out. I've a site on WordPress, Spew Warnings, and I'd like to shovel all my 900k words of ficcage someplace, ha.

[dragonofeternal]

I don't remember the first fan site I visited, but I have fond memories of pouring through search results on different search engines to find new things. I remember Dogpile was particularly good at digging up (lol) fan sites I hadn't seen before. Probably the two fansites I spent the most time on in my early days were Meg-chan's Digimon Sekai, a Digimon-specific fansite where I first learned about gijinkas and doing fanart in photoshop, and lelola.net, a fansite that had info about a lot of anime fandoms. lelola.net in particular was formative because it really solidified the idea of "anime" as its own distinct genre/medium for me, and because it had a pretty extensive section for each anime about what was different between the Japanese and English versions.

Thanks for reading!

[pronker]

Oh, Dogpile, the memories ... I'm pleased to share them. The anime, gijinkas, and p-shop learning curves continue to entertain even now. I'm fascinated with differences between Japanese and English versions, linguistically.

[pronker]

I just now visited lelola.net and received a nice note that the person wrote about the site - plus a link to a cosplay page. Well done costumes. Thanks for the link.

[rogueslayer452]

(Here via snowflake_challenge)

01. I can't remember the first fansite I visited exactly, since back in the day I visited so many. A lot of them personalized websites, like dedicated to a specific show/movie or character/ship, some others were specifically for listening to/downloading sound wavs of quotes or pieces of dialogue spoken from a piece of media. Unfortunately I can't remember the site names, and they're obviously defunct now. But that was among my first fansites I recall visiting a lot. This was before going to forums and message boards and before I discovered places like FF.Net and LiveJournal. Man, the Internet was quite a different time back then, wasn't it?

02. I haven't watched Dark Shadows all the way through so I don't have a strong opinion either way, however I remember watching rerun episodes of it during high school.

Thanks for reading!

[pronker]

01. Oh, I know! The internet first days of anyone, I suspect, remain precious memories of being overwhelmed by all the riches, ha. Before retirement, I knew I'd be reading and watching lots of TV; I never anticipated the internet ...

02. Dark Shadows had a life after death *snerk* that I never suspected because I was busy at the time graduating and working and such. It seems the series was rerun in bits and pieces through the years. A few weeks back I discovered this blog, darkshadowseveryday, which is a hilarious, insightful and detailed analysis of the episodes showing Barnabas Collins at his best/worst. :) And not just the show, but Jonathan Frid's national tours, the books and ephemera, and a first penny dreadful rendition from 1845 of common vampire imagery such as portraits with mysterious powers, and so on, called Varney the Vampire.